To meet the demand for wireless data traffic having increased since deployment of fourth generation (4G) communication systems, efforts have been made to develop an improved fifth generation (5G) or pre-5G communication system. Therefore, the 5G or pre-5G communication system is also called a ‘Beyond 4G Network’ or a ‘Post long term evolution (LTE) System’. The 5G communication system is considered to be implemented in higher frequency (mmWave) bands, e.g., 60 GHz bands, so as to accomplish higher data rates. To decrease propagation loss of the radio waves and increase the transmission distance, beamforming, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), full dimensional MIMO (FD-MIMO), array antenna, analog beam forming, and large scale antenna techniques are discussed in 5G communication systems. In addition, in 5G communication systems, development for system network improvement is under way based on advanced small cells, cloud radio access networks (RANs), ultra-dense networks, device-to-device (D2D) communication, wireless backhaul, moving network, cooperative communication, coordinated multi-points (CoMP), reception-end interference cancellation and the like. In the 5G system, hybrid frequency shift keying (FSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) modulation (FQAM) and sliding window superposition coding (SWSC) as an advanced coding modulation (ACM), filter bank multi carrier (FBMC), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and sparse code multiple access (SCMA) as an advanced access technology have been developed.
In the recent years several broadband wireless technologies have been developed to meet the growing number of broadband subscribers and to provide more and better applications and services. The second generation (2G) wireless communication system has been developed to provide voice services while ensuring the mobility of users. The third generation (3G) wireless communication system supports not only the voice service but also data service. The 4G wireless communication system has been developed to provide high-speed data service. However, the 4G wireless communication system currently suffers from lack of resources to meet the growing demand for high speed data services. Therefore, the 5G wireless communication system is being developed to meet the growing demand of various services with diverse requirements, e.g., high speed data services, ultra-reliability and low latency applications and massive machine type communication. The spectrum utilization efficiency needs to be improved. There is high potential that various services are to be supported in a single 5G cellular network, and hence flexible multiplexing of multiple services is necessary. In addition, the system design should consider forward compatibility to smoothly add new services in the future.
FIG. 1 shows an example of resource allocation in LTE systems according to the related art. In the cellular networks, the system design usually has limited flexibility on resource allocations. Take the 4G LTE system as one example; the resources assigned for downlink and uplink data transmission are usually a number of physical resource blocks (PRBs) pairs as a baseline, which occupies one subframe in the time domain and several contiguous or non-contiguous PRBs in the frequency domain, as shown in FIG. 1. There is limitation of the current schemes to support various resource allocation scenarios in the 5G networks. For example, it is beneficial to allow data transmission re-use some of the unused control regions to improve spectrum utilization efficiency. In addition, there is a need to support multiplexing different services or user equipments (UEs) in a time division multiplexing (TDM) manner within a transmission time interval (TTI) or subframe. The symbols in a TTI or subframe are not all allocated to a UE in some scenarios. However, no resource allocation protocol has been specified. In this disclosure, the methods of flexible resource allocations for the future cellular networks, e.g., LTE-advanced (LTE-A) or 5G, is disclosed.
The above information is presented as background information only to assist with an understanding of the present disclosure. No determination has been made, and no assertion is made, as to whether any of the above might be applicable as prior art with regard to the present disclosure.